ations of the world, which has exerted, and continues to
exert, incalculable power over painting, and which is the inspiration as
well as the despair of those who try to master its secret.

The other schools of Italy, with all their superficial varieties of
treatment and feeling, depended for their very life upon the extent to
which they were able to imbibe the Florentine influence. Siena rejected
that strength and perished; Venice bided her time and suddenly struck
out on independent lines, achieving a magnificent victory.

Art in Florence made a strictly logical progress. As civilisation awoke
in the old Latin race, it went back in every domain of learning to the
rich subsoil which still underlay the ruin and the alien structures left
by the long barbaric dominion, for the Italian in his darkest hour had
never been a barbarian; and as the mind was once more roused to
conscious life, Florence entered readily upon that great intellectual
movement which she was destined to lead. Her cast of thought was, from
the first, realistic and scientific. Its whole endeavour was to know the
truth, to weigh evidences, to elaborate experiments, to see things as
they really were; and when she reached the point at which art was ready
to speak, we find that the governing motive of her language was this
same predilection for reality, and it was with this meaning that her
typical artists found a voice. No artist ever sought for truth, both
physical and spiritual, more resolutely than Giotto, and none ever spoke
more distinctly the mind of his age and country; and as one generation
follows another, art in Tuscany becomes more and more closely allied to
the intellectual movement. The scientific predilection for _form_, for
the representation of things as they really are, characterises not
Florentine painting alone, but the whole of Florentine art. It is an art
of contributions and discoveries, marked, it is needless to say, at
every step by dominating personalities, positively as well as relatively
great, but with each member consciously absorbed in "going one better"
than his predecessors, in solving problems and in mastering methods.
Florentine art is the outcome of Florentine life and thought. It is part
of the definite clear-cut view of thought and reason, of that exactitude
of apprehension towards which the whole Florentine mind was bent, and
the lesser tributaries, as they flowed towards her, formed themselves on
her pattern and worke